A. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a method and system for selectively replacing portions of a displayed video screen. More particularly a system and method are provided in which extraneous or undesirable image elements on a screen are blocked or replaced with more acceptable image elements.
B. Description of the Prior Art
TV channels, especially network channels, have lately taken to overlaying various “additions” or “enhancements” onto a main video screen. A particularly annoying (to some people) example is “the crawl”, which is a horizontal stream of text that is overlaid on top of an image and generally moves from right to left across the bottom of a screen. Other examples of potentially annoying extraneous image elements include pop-ups that advertise upcoming shows, sports-related “scoreboards” and “state”, and logos added for branding purposes.
Other extraneous image elements include an extra border surrounding the main screen. On at least some TV sets it is not possible to remove this border from the screen, even using TV viewing modes such as zoom mode. Moreover, in most instances, even if the zoom mode removes most of an extraneous image element, some portions thereof, usually disposed along the sides and/or the top of the screen remain visible. While this may be good branding for the broadcaster or distributor of programs, it is quite distracting to the viewer, especially when the extraneous image elements are very bright or have a light color and viewing scenes provide dark backgrounds.
The extraneous image elements may, at one time or another, be perceived as distracting and/or annoying by almost all the viewers. In fact, one of the present inventors has observed a TV viewer construct a crude manual solution to this problem: a piece of heavy paper taped over the bottom portion of a TV screen to cover up a “crawl” because it was too intrusive.
Thus, a need exists for selectively removing or replacing extraneous image elements from a video screen. The removed elements can be replaced with less visually annoying and distracting elements.
Although there have been attempts or claims to solve this problem, there is no concrete, definitive solution. In U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/696,141 (Publication US 2005/0094032), the inventor proposes “to prevent the hideously scrolling ticker from being presented to the viewer”. The viewer accomplishes this “simply by manipulating a button on a remote control” to “suppress [the] scrolling part from view”.
Another attempt to eliminate the annoying and distracting overlays is detailed in a paper entitled “Erasing Video Logos Based on Image Inpainting” (Proc. IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo, Lausanne, August 2002). The authors of the paper describe methods of detecting video logos and “inpainting” (filling in of any gaps in photographs) the picture areas from which they are removed. The paper describes manually selecting the rough rectangular region of the video clip that encloses the logo. Then the color frames of the selected region are transformed into grey-scale frames, and the contrast in the grey-scale video is enhanced. The best-quality logo frame is also obtained from the video clip. After the logo is obtained, the region with logo is restored by the image “inpainting” technique (i.e., the logos are erased from the video frames). However, the method described in the paper employs an algorithm, which, although less complicated than those published previously, is still compute-intensive. For the goal of replacing a logo, crawl, or other offending video with less offensive video, the method and system of the present invention provide a simpler and more cost effective solution.